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Comment by trey-jones | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that plenty of exercise results in an improvement to quality of sleep, most of the time.

My experience is that weight-lifting increases my sleep requirements (and also improves quality of sleep).

Some people do weigh-lifting before sleep as it gets them tired to drift into a bliss easily, but others say if they do the exercise they cannot sleep at all and they actually prefer to do it after sleep. I wonder why such a drastic difference of experience between people?

People are different, period

How you do your lifting can have drastic effects on how pumped up or relaxed you are afterwards. Lifting can be meditative and slow and systematic and leave you tired without being agitated, or you can do the full "Rocky" thing and get all pumped up and adrenaline flowing and grunting like the Hulk, and come out of it not just unable to sleep but unable to sit still.

Could be other things as well, of course, but that strikes me as one factor that might well produce those different effects.

Yeah, exercise tires me out regardless, that's the core. The difference is whether I get amped up at the same time.

Ive found the biggest difference is how much I've used my body in the past few days - working out for the first time in a while leaves me energized no matter what time it is.

There may be a small number of people for whom strenuous exercise right before sleep doesn't interfere, but a more likely explanation in my mind is broscience. The weightlifting community is especially susceptible to training methodologies which are suboptimal but fit the identity they're performing. Are these people really scientifically evaluating the affect of intense exercise close to bedtime, or are they working backwards from what _feels_ the most "manly"?

Your mileage may vary.

Personally, the ideal time for me to lift is my serum caffeine peak, and when I'm done, it takes a half hour to 45 minutes for my heart rate to return to baseline. I'll sweat another 500ml or so during the refractory period, and have no appetite to speak of. I can't even imagine sleeping during this time.

After which my appetite returns with a vengeance, and I'm up for a big meal and a long nap if I can swing it. I sleep very well on lifting nights, which is a blessing because my sleep quality is unfortunately poor in general these days (you can skip the advice, I don't need or want it, thanks).

Lifting weights starting about three hours before bedtime might work, actually, but hasn't really been compatible with gym scheduling for me. I'm about to join one with later hours and might try it, although rallying after supper strikes me as unlikely given my usual energy levels. Worth a shot though!

I have a weird ancedote. I used to experience the same effect, but now that I've gotten to dangerously heavy weights (385 squats, 435 deadlift, etc...), I have stopped being able to go up in weight and sleep benefits have gone away.

I do various routines to push that number higher, but it's slow and most of the cycle I'm not at my heaviest weights.

Anyway, now I run and I get those benefits again.

Just weird how the benefits of weight lifting have slowed down with a half decade of experience..

What’s the motivation to lift dangerously heavy weights?

Is there some trade-off to be gained vs. the long term risk or injury?

I'm with you. I don't really push myself as a result. If I can do them safely I'm happy.

But as soon as stuff moves that isn't supposed to, I deload. I'm still able to knock out 315lb squats easy.

My original goal was to make thick bones and get muscle while I'm still young. If I can carry lifting into old age, I'm hoping to stay good sized and move around.

Plus all the health benefits until then.

Yeah the muscle and bone development you get from lifting that heavy really help out in your old age. It's kind of like a reservoir of ability.

I did a lot of grinding out heavy reps when I was younger and less experienced(mid-30s now) but now I am suspicious of that whole idea. If I stick to two reps before failure - i.e. when I start really slowing down the movement - my recovery time post-workout becomes much better and I don't experience as much collapse-into-bed tiredness, but I'm still seeing progression. There's an old broscience debate about whether muscle damage is critical but my own observation is that if it is, you don't need a lot of it, and doing so would favor PED users with tons of recovery capacity.

I also shifted my focus away from the largest muscle groups towards hip/core/shoulders, under a similar reasoning that if what I'm up against is mostly recovery capacity, the small muscles can be trained safely at higher frequency and will have the most impact on injury prevention and avoiding the stoop, rounded shoulders, etc. that afflicts the old.

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